Rio packs up, cleans up after World Cup party

RIO DE JANEIRO — As the victor was decided Sunday night and 20,000 fans left the Copacabana beach to continue the party or even to catch rides back to their native countries, one group of Brazilians was busy darting around their feet: Scores of human recyclers collecting trash and cans among the beer-soaked piles of refuse left on the iconic beach.

Among the spontaneous and efficient cleanup crew was Vanderlei Vieira, 42, who had a human-sized trash bag slung over his shoulder and crushed cans with his feet. He said he hoped to fill five such bags that night. Each bag could weigh 25 kilograms filled with cans, with downtown recycling hubs offering about 70 cents per kilo.

Asked if he thought soccer fans had been too messy in his city, he said the issue wasn’t throwing trash on the ground. “It’s the World Cup. Some people are too polite, and some people are just ignorant,” he said before a man called him over to take his extra-large beer can.

Brazilians went back to normal work Monday after the dizzying month-long tournament, which brought an estimated 600,000 foreign tourists from 180 countries and more than 3 million Brazilian travelers to 12 host cities. Local governments altered traffic, set up campsites for economical tourists to sleep, shifted school schedules and reallocated extra police to serve the touristic corridors, either giving locals a wanted excuse to shrug their shoulders and join the party or pent-up frustrations over an inefficient month.

The federal government called its management of the event a success story, saying it showed to foreign tourists and heads of state that the country is prepared in terms of infrastructure and security. The event surpassed the negative projections about Brazil’s ability to host an international sporting event, President Dilma Rousseff said Monday. “We have seen, in these recent days, a great party. Yet again, the Brazilian people have shown their capacity to receive others well,” she said.

But that success largely depended on declaring holidays in host cities during games, essentially asking Brazilians to stop their daily lives while the event went forward. Rio’s downtown corridors, usually the heart of the working city, were long stretches of empty blocks on game days here.

But by Monday, signs of the frenzy were already being dismantled. Large numbers of Argentine campers had already begun to take their tents down in the downtown samba stadium and a large plaza ceded by the local government for their use, areas from which the city’s trash company said it had already removed more than six tons of trash. A drama over a soccer ticket mafia had some closure when the alleged ringleader of a fraudulent ticket-sales group turned himself into Rio authorities voluntarily Monday afternoon.

As street life returned to regular pace, Rio de Janeiro’s Saara market of lower-priced goods was its usual scene of shoppers and hawkers: young boys hoisted signs, “We buy gold!,” cooks fried pastels, the staple pocket snack with cheese and meat fillings, and vendors stretched tarps with electronics and used shoes to sell to workers on their lunch breaks.

One street vendor, who asked not to use his name since he does not have a permit, said the event frustrated him because he invested too heavily in Brazil gear, like green-and-yellow shirts and pens, when he had hoped the national team would make it to the final. He now had packed up the gear and didn’t expect to sell it quickly.

“The World Cup was exhausting both in terms of hopefulness and sadness,” he said, adding that he was referring both to his expectations for the Brazil team’s performance “and our sales.”

But Marcelo Kontoyannopoulos, 41, had taken a more wily approach to picking business back up after the event. He sells flags for Brazil’s top professional soccer teams and had added the best-performing countries among the mix he sold during the tournament, including now several leftover Argentina flags.

“I already had them, so now I wrote ‘Vice’ on them and lowered the price,” he said of the $4.50 Argentina flags. He sold German ones next to them for twice the price. “In Brazil, we have a jeitinho (special way to get around bad circumstances) to keep things going.”